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An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

Ground zero memorial, an unflinching confrontation with loss

New York — When the rescuing was done and the mountains of crumpled steel cleared away, a crater seven stories deep was left behind.

The nerve center of what is arguably the most important city in the world was a massive wound.

But that gash, a giant hole descended to bedrock, was part of what would inspire a new vision for the World Trade Center in New York.

The physical and emotional void created by the terrorist attacks has become the defining characteristic of the master plan for the site, an attempt to serve the needs of both remembrance and revitalization.

It’s a challenge, certainly, to embody the metaphor of absence and loss on the one hand while creating new, open spaces for the living on the other.

“My idea was not to build on the space where people were murdered, to leave that space completely open, to leave it as a memorial,” said architect Daniel Libeskind, responsible for the World Trade Center master plan, in an interview for the Discovery Channel.

I toured the site in late August and found a place still dominated by hard hats, scaffolding, upturned earth and the sounds of heavy equipment.

Concrete floors were being poured in what will be the nation’s tallest building, sculptural beams were being forged deep underground for a future transit center and sod was being laid out like carpet in anticipation of Sunday’s anniversary.

It will be several years before the work is complete and we have a sense of how it all works. But the amount of intelligence, investment, innovation and muscle being poured into this place is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and symbolism enough for now.

The site will include a memorial, a tree-filled plaza, a museum, a series of skyscrapers around the perimeter and a new transit gateway into the city.

On Sunday the memorial, the first project to reach completion, will be unveiled at a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. For the first time, fresh imagery and narratives become possible at ground zero.

Called “Reflecting Absence,” the memorial is a pair of immense, black holes set into the square footprints of the fallen towers. Water plunges about four stories to shallow reflecting pools that mirror the sky, reminding us of the vacancy above.

The enormous scale and stark minimalism have a brute force. The magnitude of destruction is clearly recalled, inescapably because of the literal connection to the site.

The names of those killed in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, as well as those killed in the World Trade Center attacks in 1993, are cut into the parapets that rim the memorial pools. With the letters incised in bronze, the names, too, are voids.

Scores of white swamp oaks, taken from areas near the other attacks, surround the memorial.

When I visited, the water was not flowing yet. This may be why I found the memorial cold, bloodless even. The water, which I’ve seen footage of since, is an essential, enlivening element.

It is not only beautiful. It is conceptually poignant. It contributes an iconography of falling.

The sensation of falling is intrinsically tied to the idea of death here. The tall spills of water recall some of the most sensitive imagery from that day.

The final seconds of thousands of lives were shrouded in two ruinous cascades when the towers collapsed. The most public victims were those who emerged from the smoke-filled windows and fell to their deaths, a lonely, 10-second journey made by as many as 200 people.

Like the shock of the day itself, this memorial stabs at the heart. It asks us to confront those deaths viscerally. What did they experience in those seconds? Fear, confusion, regret, love, faith?

Still, there is a fine line between a minimalism that provokes awe and one that is simply blank, between abstractions that inspire an instinctual reaction and those that prompt a sort fo vapid melancholy, what Maureen Dowd once dubbed “architectural Muzak.”

And in this sense, “Reflecting Absence,” designed by architect Michael Arad, dances on the razor’s edge. While beautifully conceived, the memorial has weaknesses, too.

We are kept far from the edge of the pools, for safety purposes, but this frustrates our natural curiosity. Looking across the expanse, the immensity is a strong visual experience but not a physical one.

And the names of the dead, while at intimate range and touchable, feel separated from the meaning of the artwork. The names are not integrated into the experience as they are at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the work Arad’s is most often compared to.

At the Vietnam memorial, we walk along the wall and get a sense of the deepening conflict of war. The wall rises to a greater height and the names listed chronologically stack up above our heads.

That memorial by Maya Lin departs from Arad’s in another way, too – it offers hopeful release. The list of names thins as we move up toward daylight and the Washington Monument.

In the 9-11 memorial, water spills to the reflecting pool and then deeper still into another chasm – a second square hole – without a visible bottom. This is brutal metaphor, even with the flow of water, a symbol of life itself.

Perhaps the symbolism is apt. The war in Vietnam had an end while the animosities that lead to terrorism go on. Perhaps it’s a reflection on the unceasing nature of grief or a symbol of the unknown faced by those who died that day.

And maybe it is good to be unsettled rather than consoled.

I’m not sure.

I do know the meaning of this place won’t be understood fully until the white noise of the jackhammers ceases, the various projects are done and people have a chance to come here and respond.

The museum and towers may, for instance, offer a note of hope that the memorial does not.

The 1 World Trade Center tower will be the tallest and strongest building in the U.S. and is slated to open next year. It pays homage to its predecessors visually and will rise to a symbolic 1,776 feet.

“1776 is not just a clever number, it’s a date,” said Libeskind, responsible for the master plan, in his Discovery Channel interview. “That’s the date that declared that all people have full human rights, not just Americans, everybody in the world deserves rights, justice.”

Architect David Childs, who witnessed the collapsing towers from his office window, designed the building. It sits on a pedestal, reinforced inside like a mammoth bunker, lifting all offices at least 20 stories off the ground for security reasons.

Taking in the view from the 73rd floor of this tower, over to the midtown skyscrapers, out to the Statue of Liberty and down to the memorial pools directly below, it was hard not to think about those who held this view a decade ago. I understood even more why some debate the wisdom of building tall in New York.

Still, the skyline is one of the great 20th century inventions and the density of tall buildings remains an important tool for urban design. The towers rising around ground zero, designed by celebrated architects, with heights that spiral up to the tallest 1WTC, may repair one of the most cherished skylines in the world.

My own belief, though, is that the most hopeful and forward-looking gesture may come from deep underground and the mind of an architect we know well here in Milwaukee.

The new transportation hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava, will usher hundreds of thousands of people into the city through a white, light-filled, cathedral-like space.

It promises to be engineered in the tradition of the great 19th century train stations while being uniquely inventive, too. Slated to be open in 2014, it will be the final project of the new World Trade Center. (I toured the under-construction station and will write more about it as part of our coverage of the 10th anniversary of the Milwaukee Art Museum, also designed by Calatrava).

On Sunday, though, the family members of those killed a decade ago, with President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush, will be among the first to gather around the memorial.

They will travel through the dense ravines of New York’s financial district into a changed and newly open space to do it.

About Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists.

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